South Africa

Sasol plans to power its operations in the municipalities of Secunda and Sasolburg with two 10 MW solar projects. The successful bidders with sell power to the factories under power purchase agreements.

The South African national power company is planning to deploy large scale energy storage capacity at the Skaapvlei substation. The facility will help manage the intermittent energy generated by a 100 MW Eskom wind farm.

The steel manufacturer aims to sign power purchase agreements for six operational sites in Vanderbijlpark, Newcastle, Vereeniging, Pretoria, Thabazimbi and Saldanha.

Sun Exchange has closed a $4 million Series-A funding round by obtaining a $3 million investment from ARPF, a Mauritian private equity fund. The peer-to-peer solar leasing platform said it will use the funds to help its members deploy solar solutions across sub-Saharan Africa.

Cell supply shortages could kick-start manufacturing activity in India, EV car sales are braced for a fall while still gaining market share and a new date has been set for the world’s biggest solar trade show.

Sasol has launched a request for information process to supply its South African operations with renewable energy.

The debt-saddled South African utility has issued an expression of interest to seek proposals on how to refurbish three fossil fuel power plants to be decommissioned in the current decade. Eskom said that all of the proposed solutions should be at the tech-readiness level.

While it has seen little fallout for its operating PV assets, the Norwegian solar developer says the coronavirus pandemic has started to affect construction, commissioning and testing of some of its new solar plants.

The country’s energy regulator published two papers this week to solicit public feedback on plans that Mineral Resources and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe recently submitted for review. The first document relates to the tech-neutral procurement of 2 GW of short-term risk-mitigation capacity, which could see solar emerge as a winner due to its quick deployment times. The second paper is linked to the nation’s Integrated Resource Plan 2019, which aims for up to 6 GW of new large-scale solar by 2030, as well as an additional 6 GW of distributed-generation capacity.

The country’s top appeals court has dismissed the Coal Transporters Forum’s long-running effort to nullify 2.3 GW of power purchase agreements which financially troubled utility Eskom signed with solar and wind developers in the country’s fourth national tender round years ago.